Diner Dash

When Hudson announced a Gamer’s Day event a few weeks ago, I was excited about one thing: Lost in Shadow (It was formerly known as The Tower of Shadow). Unfortunately, the game wasn’t there. Instead, Hudson showed off a few of their downloadable games along with the horror game called Calling and Deca Sports DS. Here’s a roundup of games that piqued my interest.

Bonk: Brink of Extinction: It’s been a long time coming for Bonk, but thankfully, the mascot synonymous with the TurboGrafx 16 is making a comeback courtesy of Pi Studios. His latest adventure offers all the features you can expect from an update. The graphics are done in polygons, not sprites. There’s more wrinkles to the gameplay as Bonk has six new abilities that are powered by primordial ooze that he collects throughout the game. There’s even a two-player co-op mode.

But what hasn’t changed is the platforming and head-butting gameplay. Brink of Extinction is sped up slightly to keep pace with contemporary games. The jumping and spinning is still there though I wish I had a turbo button to complete the experience. Playing a Bonk title for the first time in more than decade, I almost forgot how important spinning and jumping is to the gameplay; I had to do the maneuver to reach higher areas.

One of the things I found annoying was the trampoline flowers that Bonk needed to hop on to reach higher areas. Maybe it was my timing, but I never could launch myself properly on those things.

Unfortunately, players won’t be going inside any dinosaurs in this sequel (That was one of my all-time favorite levels in any game.), but there will be the aforementioned powers and Bonk will have to backtrack and use those abilities to open hidden areas.

Hudson is calling this Bonk sequel an experiment. If it works out and enough fans download the game for $10 or 800 Microsoft Points, they may do another game. Maybe they could do Air Zonk. But regardless, players can expect an expansion pack called Dactyl’s Story later when it’s released next year.

Like Cake Mania, Diner Dash and other PC-casual-games-turned-video-games, Air Traffic Chaos creates a game out of a job, turning work into fun. But unlike previous games where the jobs were mundane, (who hasnâ€™t been a waitress or babysitter), Air Traffic Chaos plops you in a legitimate career â€“ air traffic control.

Basically, you are in charge of directing arrivals and departures at airports. Using the stylus, you tell planes where to land, when to speed up, when to hold, etc. It gets confusing pretty fast, as evident when I had my first ground collision within five minutes of playing.

There are five airports, each with three skill levels — rookie, novice and expert. Gameplay is straightforward, but the difficulty — and frustrating part — is in understanding the nuances of the job. For example, planes landing in a tail wind have to go in the opposite direction of the gusts. On top of that, players also have to keep an eye on planes taxing to the runway, so it gets chaotic when you have only one strip and four planes in a holding pattern.

Also, you learn how much air traffic controllers rely on other people. If a plane is slow to board (darn you people look for overhead bin space), you canâ€™t move it out of the gate, so the arriving plane has to wait, which causes a major backlog.